Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (8 page)

I meet successful men in the hospital all the time, but once
they’re in the ICU, either as a patient or as a family member, they have to accept that they don’t have as much control as they’d like. Some of them turn into bullies; others try to cling to a confidence that rapidly becomes thin and mechanical.

Guy Zander-Brown had already logged his ICU time. His son’s struggles had probably weathered him in an interesting way, teaching him how desperate and powerless a person can feel. He seemed completely genuine, not at all smarmy or overbearing, but successful, confident, and energetic. In lieu of formally greeting my father, he joined in the alphabet conversation, looking over Finney’s shoulder at Dad’s piece of paper, and pointing out that “Guy” had a
g
and a
u
like “Douglas” and a
y
like “Finney.”

I hadn’t even had a chance to apologize for Cami and the boys not being here when Zack’s car turned into the drive. Jeremy was driving, Cami was sitting in the passenger seat, and Zack was in the backseat of his own car. I wondered how that had happened.

As soon as he saw Cami, Finney dashed to her. “Cami, Cami, that boy . . . that boy over there”—he gestured toward my father— “he doesn’t have an
i
in his name. Just like Mommy and Daddy, he doesn’t have an
i.
”

“I hope he doesn’t mind that too much.” Cami’s hug lifted Finney off his feet. Then she set him down and pretended to examine him. “How can you have grown so much in two months?” She kissed him again, then hugged her parents and introduce them and Annie to Zack.

Zack, God love him, took one look at Miss Annie Zander-Brown and was struck dumb. He was seventeen; she was sixteen. He was still awkwardly skinny; she was confident and radiant. He would have been very happy to have Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak so that he could look at her without anyone knowing it.

Fortunately for him, she was more interested in her sister’s
makeup. “Your eyes look awesome,” she gushed to Cami. “How many different shades of shadow do you have on?”

I looked more closely at Cami’s eyelids. They did look a little like
National Geographic
pictures of the Grand Canyon at sunrise.

“You should see this dress,” Cami was saying to Annie. “It’s unbelievable. It’s like wearing a waterfall. Claudia says it’s a bias-cut silk.”

“Oh, how interesting. I hope you aren’t taking it back to California. Rachel’s little brother’s bar mitzvah is black-tie. I could wear it to that.”

“I thought you already got a dress for that.”

“But it’s not a bias-cut waterfall.”

Rose touched my arm. “Please don’t listen to them. If you don’t have girls, you’ll never understand.”

The driver had opened the limo’s trunk. “So, Mrs. Zee, you wanted the ice chest and that big white box?”

“The big white box, yes, please, but the ice chest you can wait a minute on.”

I didn’t have a clue what the big white box was, but I could guess that the ice chest was full of corn-free food.

Rose spoke to me quietly. “I hate being a nuisance about this, but—”

“No, no,” I interrupted. “If this is about Finney’s corn allergy, I understand completely. I saved all my labels; I can show you my recipes.”

“Jeremy kept telling us not to worry, but I’m a ‘food-allergy mom,’ and that’s what we do, worry.”

I knew that corn is one of the most difficult allergies to manage. Corn syrup is used in an extraordinary number of packaged or processed foods, and cornstarch appears even in many medications.

“Cami told me that Finney has been wanting to go to McDonald’s,” I said, “so we’re having hamburgers and french fries. I
made the buns and the ketchup. I got peanut oil for the french fries. I found a Jewish family who still had some kosher-for-Passover Coke.” Observant Jewish families, I’d learned, avoid all grain products during Passover, so in the spring the Coca-Cola Company produces a small run of Coke that uses cane sugar instead of the cheaper corn syrup. “I also made the cookies and the ice cream.”

Rose drew back with an involuntary gesture.

I guess I had overachieved on this meal. I’d told myself that I wanted to be nice, that I wanted to show Rose that our family understood the needs of her family. Instead I was probably coming across as terminally needy, so desperate for approval that I’d made my own ketchup.

“I like to cook,” I was now apologizing. “And I like challenges.”

“Jeremy said that too.”

Jeremy and Zack were already climbing the stairs, black vinyl garment bags folded over their arms. I waved everyone inside. The driver followed us, carrying a very large package wrapped in glossy white paper and tied with an elaborate silver bow. Its size was daunting.

“Don’t worry,” Rose said to me. “We did not bring you the Taj Mahal as a hostess gift.” She signaled to Annie and the girl handed me a perfectly straightforward gift bag—in fact, I recognized the design; her kids’ school must have sold Sally Foster gift wrap too. Inside was a pair of very interesting handmade candles, white with spirals of buff. It was the sort of “anyone will like this” gift that I can never find, at least not at a price I’m willing to pay.

“Cami, this box is for you and Jeremy,” Rose said.

“It’s heavy.” Finney said. “Very heavy.”

“What fun. I love presents,” Cami explained. She tested a corner of the box. “Oh, Finney, you’re right. It is heavy. What is it? Who’s it from?”

“I’m not going to tell you what it is,” Rose said, “and if you read the card, you’ll see it is from Jill Allyn.”

“Oh.” Cami suddenly was less happy about the gift. “Did she really make you bring it down here? Is that why you had to drive down? Because of this?”

“And Annie’s clothes,” Finney said. “Annie brings lots of clothes. Some of them are Mommy’s.”

“That’s not big news, Finney,” Annie said. “Everyone knows that.”

Cami pulled Finney to stand next to her so that they could unwrap the gift together. I guessed that “Jill Allyn” was the novelist Jill Allyn Stanley. That article about Rose had mentioned her as one of Rose’s “finds.” I hadn’t read any of her books, but patients’ wives or mothers frequently had one of them at the hospital because it was what their book clubs were reading.

Cami and Finney were being careful with the paper, discussing which piece of tape to loosen next. Every so often the sun would catch the ring on her left hand, sending a glittering splatter of light against her little brother’s shirt and the wall behind him. Finally, Jeremy suggested to Finney that it might be fun just to rip the paper. Finney brightened. He liked that idea. So he gave the paper a yank. It tore with a delicious crispness, revealing the box for a massive espresso machine made of copper and hammered aluminum.

“Wow.” Jeremy crouched down to look at it more closely. “This is something. I bet it makes great coffee.”

Cami had a more realistic eye. “But it’s so big. I don’t know where we’ll put it. Mom, we didn’t register for anything like this. How are we going to get it back to California?”

“We’ll drop it at a shipping place,” Rose told her.

“It would have been nice if Jill Allyn had done that in the first place.”

“Oh, you know her. She thought it would be fun for you to have a gift today.”

“Let’s not worry about it right now,” Guy said briskly. “We’ll take it back to Park Slope and worry about it there.”

“Is it okay if we leave it there for a while?” Cami asked. “We really don’t have room for it in our apartment.”

“It’s not like we do either,” Annie said bluntly. “Come on, Cami, Mom is always after you to throw stuff out because we don’t have enough storage space. You know how pissed off you got last Christmas because we were storing stuff in your room.”

“I was pissed off,” Cami said, “because you had your clothes all over my bed. I didn’t mind Dad putting a couple of boxes in the corner.”

“Girls.” Rose was warning them not to bicker. “We’ll take the machine to Mecox Road. That’s where we’re storing all the wedding things.”

“Oh, right.” Annie turned to me. “We have to be the only family in the world who views our house in the Hamptons primarily as an enormous closet.”

Dad had started the grill when we’d first spotted the limo, so he and Jeremy went out to cook the burgers. As Cami and Rose helped me put the rest of lunch on the table, Finney waited patiently in a corner of the dining room. Once everything was ready and he’d been told where to sit, he looked to his mother to find out what he could eat.

“You can have whatever you want,” she told him. “Jeremy’s mother made everything and she was very careful.”

He looked at me. “Very
very
careful?”

“Very very
very
careful,” I assured him.

“Thank you,” he said and instantly looked at Rose, wanting to be sure that she noticed him remembering his manners.

After being properly congratulated, he set to work, eating
with a steady, determined joy. He was so absorbed in the food that several times he started to hum, but Cami, who was sitting next to him, would lay her hand on his arm and he would stop.

The time went quickly. Guy took charge of the conversation, and it was lively and interesting. No one described the trips that they’d been on or told long stories about people the rest of the group didn’t know. Finally Rose caught Guy’s attention and lifted her wrist, tapping her watch.

“Oh, lord,” he groaned and leaned back in his chair to look out the dining-room window. “The car’s probably been out there for an hour. We need to get moving. We have to eat again in two hours.” They were meeting Mike, Claudia, and Mike’s mother for afternoon tea at the Ritz-Carlton.

“Finney, you should use the bathroom before we go,” Rose said. “Ask Jeremy where it is.”

Obediently, Finney went upstairs. I heard him moving around, looking in the bedrooms. I wondered if he had forgotten Jeremy’s directions or if he was just curious about the rest of the house. When he came down, he spoke hopefully. “Lunch again first?”

“You can have a snack in the car,” Rose said to him.

“Okay,” he said agreeably. “But Mrs. Van Darcy. I like her food. She makes good food.”

“That’s certainly the truth,” Guy agreed and rumpled Finney’s hair. “You have good taste, Mr. Finney. We’ll certainly know where to find you if you ever run away from home.”

Finney giggled, probably responding more to Guy’s tone than his actual words. But the words did give me an idea. I spoke quietly to Rose. “Would Finney like to spend the rest of the afternoon here? We’re not doing anything special, but it has to be better for him than tea at the Ritz.”

Rose paused.

I understood. She couldn’t be used to this, leaving Finney at other people’s houses on the spur of the moment. Between his allergies and his cognitive disability, she couldn’t just leave him someplace and hope for the best.

“Cami will be here,” I reminded her.

“Okay . . .” she said slowly. Then she waved a hand. “What’s wrong with me? His sister, a nurse, and a pediatrician. Of course it’s okay. Thank you. He will be thrilled.”

Finney brightened immediately when being asked if he wanted to spend the afternoon at Jeremy’s mother’s house. “And sleep here? I want . . . no, no, ask a question . . . May I sleep here? Please. Mrs. Van Darcy.”

I glanced at Rose. Clearly she, not Guy, made these decisions. She nodded. “There’s a sofa bed outside Zack’s room,” I said to Finney, “if you want to sleep there.”

Annie was just returning from her bathroom trip. “Sofa bed!” he told her eagerly. “I’m going to sleep on a sofa bed! Outside Zack’s room. A sofa bed.”

“You’re staying here?” Her voice was edged with envy.

The envy surprised me. Annie hadn’t made a great impression on me. I don’t like vain people, and clearly she was very vain. I would have thought that a room at the Ritz would be much more to her liking than my small house, but clearly I was wrong.

“Do you want to stay too, Annie?” I asked as if I still lived in a big house. “I have no idea where you’ll sleep, but we’ll find someplace.”

“Really?” She too looked delighted. “I can sleep with Finney, I don’t care.” Her bracelets jingled as she turned to Rose. “Can I, Mom? Please.”

“If it’s all right with Darcy,” Rose said, “but you have to work on that paper.”

“I will. I promise I will.”

Rose looked as if she believed that exactly as much as I would have believed such a promise from Zack.

“This is quite a big treat for you, young man,” Guy said to Finney. “But, Miss Queenie, I suppose you’ll want all your luggage.”

Apparently “Miss Queenie” was his endearment for Annie. “Oh, come on, Dad”—her smile was teasing—“it’s not that much.”

As they went off to unload the luggage, Rose picked up her purse. “Finney has an EpiPen in his fanny pack.”

That was a question as much as a statement. She wanted to be sure that I knew what an EpiPen was. Of course, I did. It was a single dose of epinephrine in a spring-loaded syringe. Carried by people with severe allergies, it was a life-saving device, designed for self-injection in case of anaphylaxis.

“We haven’t taught Finney to use it yet,” she said, “but he always has it on him. And here’s a backup.” She handed me a slim case that she had taken out of her purse.